Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 216, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 September 1917 — Cleanly Food Is Essential to Family Health [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Cleanly Food Is Essential to Family Health

By Dr. Samuel G. Dixon, U. S. Commissioner

of Health

, Wild animals eat their food raw, either while fresh or after it has become tender with age. This latter habit is one of the weasel's. They kill quite lib--erally of their prey when the opportunity offers and then allow it almost’to decay before they feed upon it. Primitive man hunted and devoured his food much like the lower animals. Later in the history of man he learned to make fireand eook his food, and-itis now quite evident from what we find in the Indian mounds that it became the custom, for instance, of the American Indians to have great clam bakes on the Atlantic coast. Sqmetimes in these mounds we find bones of deer, showing that

4;hey had more than one kind of foodstuff. As relics of a still later, age, we find in the mounds various little implements that were evidently used for handling and serving the food. This begins to approach conditions in the present state of civilization that we now find in the large centers pf population. Thousands of people make their sole livelihood preparing food for the table and taking eare of the dishes and the serving of the food, from the small boarding houses to the enormous hotels. In these places the health of those thus employed has not had any police supervision and yet we have known that communicable diseases have been on the rapid increase and horrible diseases have been passed from one person to another until they have become a great menace to the health, happiness and efficiency of our people. The state of Pennsylvania, fortunately, in 1915 succeeded in passing a law that requires those in charge of restaurants, boarding houses, hotels, etc., to look after the health of their people. The law handles it in this way, that it holds the proprietor of those places responsible for employing people who have these dangerous diseases that can be communicated to their customers through the foodstuff itself, or through the dishes', forks, knives, spoons, etc. Cooks and waiters cannot, under this new law, pursue their occupations without satisfying those they propose to serve that they aTe clean from these diseases the law is trying to prevent being thus spread. The moment this new law was signed by the governor, a large number of waiters left their places in the Pullman coaches on the railroads and from the great railroad restaurants, as well as from the large and active hotels. This became well known and the newspapers and journals endeav-*>red-tn spread 4his-newa-±hat the people might wake up to what had existed and what the new law proposed to protect them from. When the bill asking for this law was introduced in the general assembly some of the great railroad companies that have large restaurants at their termini appreciated that it was a great sanitary measure and before the bill became a law they adopted its good points in the management of their great eating centers throughout the United States. , This law, like all other new laws that mean to bring about a great -change in public policies, has to be sanely enforced,'and the old system of preparing-food and. washing of dishes in hotels and restaurants must not be too suddenly destroyed. The time, fortunately, is here when the public has become educated and the people are demanding that the spirit of this good law be carried out. Some hotels advertise on their letterhead paper that the law is enforced in their establishments. As the great cities grow the ways of living change. There become iewer private homes and more places where people live collectively and depend upon central places for eating. Therefore this law is becoming more and more important in regard to these centers, that they may not spread dangerous disease through a community.